Something concrete to show your provost this fall.
Most universities have not set an AI policy. Faculty are improvising in private and getting it wrong in public. First Light is a defensible institutional response your CTL can put in faculty hands now, while the policy work catches up.
Talk about a pilot→Opens an email. Three quick questions, no form to fill out.
What anyone gets, free
- ◈Paste an assignment prompt. Receive a five-dimension analysis across context specificity, task openness, process visibility, output type, and verification surface. Each dimension scored 1–10 with the actual language from the assignment as evidence.
- ◈A specific punch list of revisions. Not generic advice. Each recommendation names a part of the assignment by phrase and explains exactly why an LLM cannot fluently produce the proposed step, given current model capabilities.
- ◈A printable PDF report faculty can take to a department chair, a CTL conversation, or a syllabus committee.
Available right now at firstlight.solutions. No login, no pilot required, no institutional setup.
What the institutional pilot adds
- A 30-minute kickoff with your CTL team. So First Light arrives in your faculty’s hands as part of a coordinated institutional response, not a random URL discovery.
- Direct access to the faculty member who built it. Not a support queue. A real line to the person designing the tool, for questions, faculty feedback, and the patterns you’re seeing on the ground.
- A 30-minute check-in midway through the pilot. What your faculty are running through it. What’s landing. What’s confusing.
- An end-of-pilot debrief and conversion conversation. A concrete reference point to take to your provost, covering what we piloted, what we learned, and what to decide for spring, plus an honest discussion of whether continued use is worth budget. Straightforward conversion if it works; clean exit if it doesn’t.
- Cohort learning, when relevant. With your consent, anonymized patterns from other pilot institutions, learning you can’t get from solo use of the tool.
Who’s behind First Light
First Light is built by John Nash, a faculty member and researcher focused on applied AI use in education. It comes out of the same problem your faculty are facing: assignments that no longer hold up under AI. It is designed by someone working that question directly, not a vendor selling into education from the outside.
Pilot logistics
Free through Fall 2026, running through the end of the fall semester. Unlimited use by your institution’s faculty during the pilot. Your time commitment: about an hour across the kickoff and check-in.
Why now
Three things are converging on CTL directors right now. Faculty are losing trust in their own assignments and asking for help. AI-detector tools have collapsed as a defense. The false positives are damaging student relationships. And provosts are asking what the institution is doing about AI in coursework, but the formal policy work is months or years out.
First Light fills the gap. It lets faculty redesign their own assignments now, in private, with a specific advisor in their pocket. It is not a detector. It does not surveil students. It does not require an LMS integration. It is something a CTL can roll out now and point to throughout the fall.
Data practices in one paragraph
Assignment text is sent to Anthropic’s API for analysis. Anthropic deletes API inputs and outputs after seven days and does not use them for model training. First Light keeps no copies on our servers. Faculty see an explicit reminder at paste time not to submit student work; we don’t enforce this technically, and the workflow is designed around analyzing assignment prompts, not student submissions.
Full data practices →This pilot cohort is higher-education-focused. K-12 and independent schools, especially those running on Canvas or other major LMS infrastructure, are welcome to use the homepage tool, and institutional conversations with secondary schools will follow.
One email starts the conversation.
If your CTL is wrestling with AI in coursework right now, write three sentences and we’ll find time.
Talk about a pilot→First Light · For educational use · © 2026 First Light Technology, Inc.